26 Comments

>In a world awash in low-price oil, Canadian crude doesn’t look as attractive as it once did. Many refiners thus far are unwilling to commit to long-term deals for Canadian crude, say people familiar with the matter.

This is the crux of the problem, and it is something that TransCanada can and will overcome by offering incentives and restructuring deals. It will just take a bit longer for them to recoup costs.

“The world’s biggest and most profitable fossil fuel companies are receiving huge and rising subsidies from US taxpayers, a practice slammed as absurd by a presidential candidate given the threat of climate change.

Between 2010 and 2014, the oil, coal, gas, utility, and natural resource extraction industries spent $1.8bn on lobbying, much of it in defence of these giveaways.

OCI found in 2014 that US taxpayers were subsidising fossil fuel exploration and production alone by $21bn a year. In 2009, President Barack Obama called on the G20 to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies but since then US federal subsidies have risen by 45%.”

Oil will get transported either way, only if nobody wants to use pipes then they’ll use trains and trucks which are much more dangerous and cause more damage to the environment by using transportation methods that use up fossil fuels quite heavily. A pipeline is more environmentally friendly in the long run. Plus there are already thousands of pipelines going through the states, why does everyone throw a hissy fit now?

For the same reason that the pipeline wasn’t finished to 100% completion during the Obama administration, because the fucking price is depressed because the world is awash in an abundance of oil, mostly due to the United States becoming the number one oil producer in the world through hydraulic fracturing….. and of course the economic slowdown worldwide most namely in China, who is the world’s largest importer and user of crude oil.

Canada’s tar sands oil is not only the dirtiest and the most tenuous and tedious to extract, nobody’s going to invest in this shit unless the price takes a bump, most likely because somebody is forced to cut production for one reason or another.